A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

To contact me about organizing, email me at rpwolff750@gmail.com

Total Pageviews

Archive of Wolff Materials

Thursday, May 29, 2014

GIANTS IN THE EARTH

The required reading in our Forest Hills High School English
classes in the late '40s was an eclectic mixture of works that someone in the
downtown Manhattan headquarters of the Board of Education decided were age
appropriate.They included Edvart Rølvaag's saga of pioneer
life, Giantsin the Earth, Shakespeare's Julius
Caesar, and Lincoln Steffens' Autobiography.We were required to memorize ten lines from
the Shakespeare [any ten lines], and since I have always been simply awful at
memorization, I chose the most famous lines, the opening of Marc Antony's
speech, "Friends, Romans, and Countrymen/Lend me your ears."It was all I could do to keep those ten lines
in my head for the brief time that we were required to recite them, and today I
might at best get through the first four.I recall watching the Johnny Carson Late Show one night some years later
when the great old Canadian actor Walter Pidgeon, who was near the end of his
life, was his guest.Pidgeon turned out
to be a total flop as a guest, projecting no personality whatsoever, and Carson
labored mightily to keep the segment afloat.At one point, Pidgeon told Carson that, as a discipline, he had long ago
adopted the practice of memorizing a poem every night before going to bed.The previous evening, he said, he had
memorized a little poem about the donkey that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on what
Catholics now commemorate as Palm Sunday.Carson asked him to recite it, and as Pidgeon began, an astonishing
transformation came over him.His face
lit up, his voice lowered, and he became WALTER PIDGEON, famous actor.As soon as he had concluded the poem, the
light went out and he again became a boring old man.

At any rate, back to Lincoln Steffens' Autobiography, which is actually the inspiration for this
post.Steffens, for those of you too
young to recall, was a great muckraking journalist of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.In the Autobiography, he tells the story of how
he and Jacob Riis, another great muckraker on a competing New York daily,
created a crime wave one summer out of a mixture of boredom and competitive
spirit.You can read the entire story
here.In a nutshell, Steffens and Riis, both city
reporters, began reporting in their papers every crime on the police blotter as
it was recorded, regardless of whether it was especially newsworthy.The reading public soon became alarmed at the
dramatic rise in crime, quite unaware that there had been no change at all in
the incidence of crime, only in the incidence of reporting. Finally, Teddy Roosevelt, who was at the time
the President of the Police Board, told Steffens and Riis to cut it out.Since they were both friends of T. R. they
complied, and the public was much gratified that order had been restored to the
streets and homes of the city.

I was reminded of this story after I posted that rather dour
comment yesterday with the Yeats poem.One
of the side effects of the advent of the Internet is that every ugly thing
anyone does or says anywhere gets recorded by someone with a cell phone and in
less time than it takes to text OMG goes viral.Since there is a Gresham's Law of journalism, according to which bad news
drives out good, obsessive surfers like me are fed an unrelenting diet of
horribles.No wonder Tiggers turn into
Eeyores.

I shall strive to retain my balance in the future [even
while tripping and falling flat on the pavement.]

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.